1. Add contents of Packet 1 to fire.
2. After 24 hours, add contents of Packet 2.
3. You should see Live Fire-Monkeys within 24 hours. Fire-Monkeys need food! Feed Fire-Monkeys one yellow spoonful from Packet 3 every five days. Enjoy your Fire-Monkeys!

_{Image CC-BY-NC-ND by Edson Martins}

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My great-uncle Milton was one of the last living residents of Freeport, Kansas. He had made a fortune selling bibles to bible-salesmen, and he kept it all in cash in a bunker under his barn.

On a hotter-than-hell July morning in 2000, Great Uncle Milton rubber-cemented eleven three-cent Charter Oak stamps from 1933 on each of two letters: One to an address in Argonia and one to an address in Anthony.

Five days later two strangers came walking into town. One was a morbidly-obese woman of indeterminate age with bright orange skin carrying a two-liter bottle of carrot juice. The other was a scrawny old white dude who needed a shave and looked like Pappy Yokum. Neither one of them looked fit to walk; certainly not in this killing heat. Great Uncle Milton sent them to the cellar with a couple of Picnic Paks he had me buy for him at the Wal-Mart in Wellington.

Two days later the cellar door banged open and the strangers climbed out with bloodshot eyes and slept-in clothes. Great Uncle Milton handed each of them a suitcase full of cash and they wandered back out of town the way they had come. Ol’ Milt went and took the seat off the tractor and bolted it to a skateboard my nephew Brandon had abandoned the summer before. Then he went down to the cellar and came up with his arms bent out way in front of him full of a big bale of nothin’. He unrolled the nothin’ out on the dirt in front of the skateboard and spent more than an hour making sure it was nice and smooth. Then he stripped naked and sat his skinny ass down on the tractor seat and I swear to god it actually sizzled.

“Uncle Milton, you look funny naked,” my daughter Ashley said.

“Can I have a suitcase full of money too?” I asked.

“Look at them billowing,” Great Uncle Milton said, pointing out at the waves of heat rising off the dirt. “Ain’t they pretty?”

“Come back inside and drink some water,” my wife said.

Great Uncle Milton just laughed. “Good luck with everything,” he said.

The skateboard began to roll forward. Great Uncle Milton wobbled on his seat, still laughing and clacking his dentures. Ashley ran after him and threw her arms around the empty air as she fell in the dust. Great Uncle Milton was rising into the afternoon sun. My wife folded her arms and looked disapproving.

Soon Great Uncle Milton was completely out of sight.

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I fell asleep in bed last night with a wet cigarette in my hand. By the time the water alarm went off and woke me the room was already knee-deep and full of choking spray. I could hear the curtains begin to sluice. I crawled to the door and felt it with my palm but it was already deadly cool. I picked up a chair and threw it against the window but it bounced back, hit me across the shins and knocked me into the rising tide. I heard shouting from outside. An ax blade crashed through the sill and a gloved hand reached into the room. I grasped at it with the last of my strength. The waterfighter pulled me through the hole and carried me down the ladder. Then the rest of the squad let loose with fire from the hydrant and slowly, painfully extinguished the water. My house is now a steaming ruin.

_{image CC-BY-NC-SA by azrasta}

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You know what a suitcase party is, right? It’s a surprise going-away party. Everybody shows up with their suitcase packed, pays twenty bucks at the door and puts their name into a hat. The hosts pick a name out of the hat and use the money to buy a one-way ticket to wherever for whoever gets drawn. At the end of the night the hosts announce the winner and that person flies off to wherever the hosts picked and spends the next few years getting drunk, getting a job, getting married or whatever as an illegal alien in whatever unfamiliar country.

In the summer of 1986, after I dropped out of the U of M for the second time, I was sort of friends with this party promoter named Kurt who made everybody call him Phil after Phil Graham, and Kurt knew this chemist named Dave who made everybody call him Eulenspiegel because he wanted to be the new Owsley, and Dave was cooking all these variants of Ecstasy and his runners and acolytes were retailing them at Kurt/Phil’s parties. You’d get this big wave of emotion washing over the whole party as the drugs peaked. One after another people would giggle uncontrollably, or burst into tears, or tear off their clothes, or get the hiccups, or whatever. One time everybody got déjà vu.

But anyway one morning about noon I was on my way to the Wienery for some franks and eggs, and I ran into both Kurt and Dave, fired up and running in three different directions. Kurt had found a new DJ with great taste, great tits and her own PA, and Dave had a new molecule that was a big secret that he couldn’t shut up about. Both of them wanted me to work the show, probably because I was the only guy they knew that they trusted with money and guns. I told Dave I didn’t feel like dealing that week, but I told Kurt I’d work the door and he could pay me in Dave’s new product. (I had a bunch of side jobs going that had already paid the rent that month, so what the hell.)

So it’s Saturday night and Kurt’s hot DJ is spinning all these supposedly-stolen dubplates some girlfriend of hers just drove in from Detroit. The floor is packed. Half the crowd is already down to their underwear because the AC is on the fritz. I’m standing at the door holding down ten thousand bucks with a Glock 17 that’s pulling my Levi’s off my butt. There’s a girl about five-foot nothing dressed like hell in bike shorts and a wifebeater who I want to give some urgent fashion advice to in the back room but who won’t meet my eyes. I’ve dropped Dave’s big purple pill same as anybody but it hasn’t done anything except make my forehead sweaty and my nipples hard. Best I can tell, it seems to have done that to everybody.

When the bass break drops I’m in the middle of the floor and the money’s gone. I grab for the Glock but it’s gone too. I start running for the door but I’m right there, staring at my gun like I’ve never seen one before. I look down and I’m wearing lycra shorts. My bra itches. The guy by the door sticks my gun in his waistband, picks up the bag with the money and walks out the door. I run after him but my geometry’s all wrong. I keep crashing into dancers who spill their vitamin drinks on me.

By the time I get out the door the guy who looks like me has found my bike and is trying to start it but he kicks like a girl. I turn out to be a good sprinter and I’m about to take him down with a flying tackle when the engine turns over and he squeals out into the street. I’ve got my arms around his neck and I’ve got scratches all over my thighs from where I hit the bike. My toes drag on the asphalt for a few seconds until I get my leg up and over. Now I’m riding bitch on my own bike behind some asshole with my gun, my shoulders and my money. I’d choke his ass if it wouldn’t kill us both. Dude rides like the insane. He’s going seventy back into town on 55, ignoring all the lights and weaving around cross-traffic, then up East Lindale and over on Plymouth and then some scary shit with alleys and Dumpsters and then he’s the money and he’s tearing around front of some sandstone apartment building. I’m chasing him and screaming in a crazy high voice. I’ve got my hand on his belt before he can get through the front door and I’m trying to take him down but he drags me up two flights of stairs and into an apartment that’s even dirtier than mine but with more throw-rugs and smells like stale perfume.

The money bag hits the floor and he’s got my shirt off before I can get loose. I pull his jeans down to his knees and I’m laughing because I can see the stains from changing the bike’s oil, and he’s got my bra off and his hand down my shorts and he carries me like that into a bed with flowered sheets and I’m going down on him and his dick looks just like mine.

I wake up sore and stinking. The guy, my pants, my money, my dick? All gone. I spend most of Sunday cleaning the apartment. On Monday I take a shower and drive the girl’s car to the girl’s job, work all day and come home to an empty fridge and an unpaid cable bill. After a couple weeks I get horny and go looking for a date. After a couple years I move in with Craig. A couple years later I move out. First of many. Life-long pattern.

I get lonely, but at least I have my work.

_{image CC-BY-NC-ND by Curtis Gregory Perry}

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When I finally pulled myself away from this guy Matt who said he was an amateur film editor, and I got done tactfully explaining how contemptible it was to have one’s life’s passion to be editing someone else’s life’s passion, I discovered I was the only woman left at the party. In confirmation of my life-long hypothesis, none of the men seemed to have noticed.

When I got out to the parking lot I saw Lise Novacek trying to un-park the Infiniti her husband Brian usually drove. (On my way out I had seen Brian by the stairs engaged in some kind of liars’ duel with a guy I didn’t know.) I had time to get into my car (a ‘98 Hyundai Accent hatchback, which should have doomed my dating life but never seems to have) and pull out before Lise finally got the Infiniti pointed toward the street. I don’t know why I followed her. I suppose it was one of those combinations of Red Bull, dark rum, nicotine cravings and late-night hypomania that sometimes grabs me towards the end of a party. My gas gauge was riding the empty line so I was hoping we didn’t have more than forty or fifty miles to go.

We dodged drunk drivers all the way through the godforsaken (and probably eight-tenths-abandoned, in this economy) northwestern commuter suburbs and out into the (until late 2007 soon-to-be-ex-) cornfields and farm towns beyond. The gas light came on as we passed through Brocken (a diesel station, two bars and a house) and we made five lefts on three gravel roads and came to a stop at the edge of a bare field. I waited for the dome light to come on in Lise’s car. And waited.

When she stepped out into the moonlight she was naked. She’s frighteningly skinny when clothed but naked she looked like a seedling of some fast-growing softwood, or like she had been drawn in ballpoint pen. She had tiny breasts and shaved-bald pubic hair, which further decreased her resemblance to a mammal. She walked purposefully into the field.

I wanted to congratulate her on the eccentricity of her suicide staging. From her, I always expected something girly and banal like Valium and vodka—certainly nothing with this degree of flair. I followed her, planning to save her at the last minute but dying to watch the foreplay. (I know how sick that makes me.)

I followed her over the rise of a contour-plowed hill and started to revise my assumptions. In the low spot below the hill were several dozen naked women, all busily and silently applying sunscreen—some to each other’s backs. I stuck my hands in my pockets and stared at the moon for a few seconds while I let the shock wear off. When I finally took a second look, Heather Schierke from work was waving me over. I remembered seeing her at the very start of the party and then losing track. She looked pretty great naked, as I would have expected and probably should have envied. She was holding out a tube of sunscreen and staring at me with a sort of curious smirk, like we were all fifteen years younger and this was some kind of high-school dare or prank. Well hell, I’m not proud. I stripped down and smeared sunscreen on my too-short legs, too-wide hips and too-long torso, hoping to god I’d be able to find my clothes if things went sideways or the moon went behind a cloud. The sunscreen burned a little—like porn shop novelty grease (not that I’d know)—but I was sure (sure enough to take my clothes off) that this crowd didn’t have that kind of vibe. I wondered who the leader was.

An older lady lit up for a second as she turned her phone on. God, I hoped this wasn’t a photo session. She clamped the phone under her butt and lifted off into the air.

My whole body felt great! Better than the first Red Bull of the day on an empty stomach. This suntan lotion was good shit! Soon all those skinny, chunky, toned and saggy buttocks were perched sidesaddle on tiny Apples and Blackberries and Samsungs, drag racing and playing chicken. If they had had baseball bats they’d have been knocking over mailboxes. I sat on my phone and hovered.

Some girl I didn’t know came diving at me from three hundred yards in the air, all calves and breasts and bared teeth. I waited until the last second and swung just out of reach, then fell in behind her and shadowed her all over the sky. She tried all the kung-fu and fighter-pilot moves she’d ever seen on film—hairpins and zigzags, top speed and sudden stops—but she couldn’t shake me. All those years of Tai Chi had taught me a thing or two.

She raced upward, on her way to a makeout party with the man in the moon. I flew behind her, close as her spine. At the very top, when the moon was the horizon and the ground was out of sight, we suddenly lost reception. Two women, hair streaming, butt-naked and ripped to the tits, fell from the sky with our arms extended, gripping our phones like the strings of two busted balloons.

It took six weeks before they let me out of the hospital. Heather Schierke won’t make eye contact at work. I never did find my car.

_{Image CC-BY-NC by Trypode}

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My brother Andrew emits an unusual Kirlian field. One of his most recent Android phones worked perfectly except for the GPS, which assigned him arbitrary coordinates each day. On the day that his phone decided he was in Zanzibar, he walked several miles due south in Minneapolis to see how far out into the Indian Ocean he could get. (In a similar but fictional case, Rydell, one of the protagonists in Beefeater Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, had a pair of augmented-reality glasses that placed Rydell in Rio when he was in San Francisco.) (And in a no-tek version of the same phenomenon, one of the standard Situationist games was to start from an arbitrary location in Paris and then follow a map of Shanghai from People’s Square to the Bund.)

Anyway, I lent Andrew Rachel’s new Canon Retrospect SD149 for the day, and it came back shooting only pictures of the Van Wijks’ (who haven’t lived here for thirty years) otterhounds (who have been dead for almost as long). I would kind of like it if the photos looked like early 80’s Polaroids, but they look just like any other gigapixel snapshots except of those damn dead otterhounds. This morning Geezer (the younger one) captured Macy Van Wijk’s underpants and Flex (the older one) was chasing her all over the house.

I stuck the Canon on a tripod with an automatic shutter release and a Wi-Fi card. So here, for your enjoyment, is longdeadotterhoundcam.com.

_{Image CC-BY by me’nthedogs}

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I found it in the crawl-space.

It was a mouse-chewed cardboard box about five inches on a side, wrapped with yellowed cellophane tape, covered with curling Lenin and Tsiolkovsky postage stamps and bearing delivery and return addresses in Cyrillic smudged well beyond recovery. There was nothing in it, but I wouldn’t call it empty.

I opened it on a Tuesday, shook out the dust, and threw it in the trash. That evening, the last two jars of Uncle Dave’s corn liquor disappeared.

On Thursday morning, we found every bottle in our last half-case of Chianti opened and partially drained. A few of the bottles had phlegm floating near the top. Late that night we heard Dad’s telex begin transmitting all by itself. By the time we were able to break into his office the transmission had ended.

On Friday at 10AM a Ford half-ton rolled up and delivered 137 cases of Georgian red wine, COD. The drivers had Marakovs stuck down the front of their greasy slacks, so my dad paid for the wine with four albums of Roman coins and the Heuer wristwatch his grandfather had left him. (First he tried to pay with a check, but that just made the Marakovs come out.)

On Saturday we found cigarette burns in the den furniture and papirosi butts all over the carpet—a third Primas and two-thirds Belomorkanals (to judge by the crushed packs).

On Sunday morning we found a dozen shattered wine bottles in the fireplace.

At two in the morning on Monday we heard the sound of air brakes. When we got outside there was an anhydrous ammonia tanker parked in front of our house. No one was in the truck, but the driver’s headrest had a quarter-sized patch of half-dried blood on it. Six hours later a Linde truck pulled up trying to deliver a hospital’s-worth of liquid oxygen. Dad tried to explain to the driver that there had been a mistake, but at that moment the three Dobermans from the Kellys’ farm appeared, snarling and barking, and chased the driver clear across the county line. Don Kelly showed up in his pickup a few minutes later and we pointed the way his dogs had gone. He called later to say the dogs were okay but the Linde driver never showed back up.

That night was a new moon. We woke at three to an earthquake and a deafening roar. We ran outside just in time to see Dad’s mint-condition 1967 BMW 2000CS lifting into the sky above a tower of flame.

Schastlivogo puti, tovarishchi!

_{Image CC-BY-NC by Emily Barney}

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Bernie Pietenpol, the great democratizer of aviation, lived in Cherry Grove, MN, fifty miles from my hometown. He designed the Sky Scout, which was powered by an engine from a Model T.

My uncle Mike, a life-long Pietenpol fanboy, moved to Cherry Grove in 2004, set up a machine shop in a pole barn and began designing time machines powered by salvaged Camry engines. He posted the plans on his website under a Creative Commons license and lived off Spam and fiber supplements, as far as I could tell. I’d drive over there once in a while with a salad or a blueberry pie, and he’d wipe the grease off his hands and eat with me in silence for a few minutes.

It used to bug me a little bit. I’d google around—curious to see who was building his designs, wondering whether they ended up satisfied or unsatisfied—and I never found a single person who claimed to be interested or building or even curious. All that work was leading to purest obscurity. Which was weird, right? Because something that messed up ought to have had a hypnotic kook factor. But always: nothing.

On the other hand, Preston, Wykoff, Ostrander… those are not big places, right? Not a lot of population; not a lot of turnover. But slowly and surely they were filling up with very happy, very wealthy families. Why there? You’d expect a little bit of slopover from Rochester, especially during a housing boom full of land-hungry people, but you wouldn’t expect all the men to have male pattern baldness and dirty fingernails and half the women to have singed eyebrows and missing digits. These folks were obviously shade-tree mechanics, they were thriving, and they were setting up housekeeping in a Poisson distribution with Cherry Grove at its center.

Basically what happened is, I got jealous.

I showed up at Mike’s with a couple sacks of U-Pick-Em raspberries, sat around in silence for forty-five minutes and finally got up to leave. I tilted my head toward the latest prototype and said, “When can I take that out for a spin?”

Mike said what he always said. “You already have, man. You already have.” He didn’t expect a laugh, but he always said it anyway. Jokes like that are just part of the Uncle Code, I guess.

But this time I said, “I’m not kidding. Is that thing ready to go?”

Mike just said, “See for yourself.”

I had yesterday’s winning Powerball numbers in my back-pocket. I climbed into the cockpit, which was not built for someone of my bulk. I looked at Mike. He nodded. I turned the key and threw the thing into reverse.

Around midnight I flushed a wild turkey. It squawked and sucked right into the intake manifold. It was at this point that I began to spot a few defects in Mike’s design. Meat, feathers and bone fragments were flying into my hair and clenched eyelids. I heard the engine rev. I tried to wipe my eyes clear. Drizzle began to fall and mix with the ground turkey. Raindrops. Downpour. Sleet. Hail. I mashed the brake pedal and listened to the warped rotors thump. Thunder crashed and Saint Elmo’s Fire lit the gizzard hanging from the mirror.

When the fuel ran out I fell unconscious for a while and woke up with my ribs aching and all my limbs numb. I climbed out into the tall grass and did a dozen half-hearted jumping jacks, then walked around front and assessed the damage. I wrestled a wishbone out of the accelerator linkage and closed my eyes. A mastodon tapped me on the shoulder.

_{Image CC-BY-NC-ND by toastforbrekkie}

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For the first eleven days in Mesa I didn’t get a damn thing except heartburn. On the twelfth day I was hanging out under the Super 8 sign with the other losers—most of them drinking Night Train, me doing shots of Milanta—when a posse of Mad Max-looking blind guys with welding masks, canes and target pistols all piled into a rust-colored ‘66 Dodge A100 van driven by a kid who was maybe—maybe—fourteen. My Pinto had died on me on day four and I had traded it for an ‘81 Littlejohn BMX bike (the other dude got the ass-end of that deal), so there I was, clown-bikin’ after the A100 with my knees around my ears. Luckily the kid couldn’t drive stick worth a damn, so I was able to catch up pretty good every time he had to shift.

I followed them along the bone-dry Salt River into Avondale someplace. Looked like a vacant lot. Good place to dump some trash. The blind guys came creaking out of the van, lined up on the riverbank with their masks and goggles on and started to bang away at the dirt. They looked like they were aiming, but basically they were just some blind dudes shooting the shit out of an empty ditch. After a while they all stopped to reload and the kid ran down with a stringer and started picking up and stringing a whole lot of nothing. When he got done with that he tied one end of the stringer to a rusty wheel rim and threw the other end into the dirt.

At this point I stopped leaning on my bike and walked over to them.

“How’s the fishin’,” I asked.

The guy I was talking to was fat like Evil Santa, with a huge burned beard and two empty eyes.

“See for yourself,” he said.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and shut up.

The shooting started again. One skinny little guy with a sweat-colored wife-beater and a full-face mask was swearing every time he pulled the trigger: “Shit! Shit! Shit!” The mustache next to him smacked him in the back of the head, which made his visor flop. “Shit!”

“That’s Stevie,” said Bad Santa. “Can’t hit a thing.”

I nodded.

“Bet you can take him,” said Santa. “Give it a shot.” He held his pistol by the barrel and swung the butt in my general direction. I took it.

It was a Smith and Wesson Model 41, early nineties maybe. I let it hang by my side. “What’m I shootin’?” I asked.

“Smallmouth,” he said, and pointed.

“Can’t see ‘em,” I said, and handed the gun back.

He showed me his silver teeth. “Gotta be blind,” he said.

There was another cease-fire and the kid was down collecting nothing again.

“What about the kid?” I asked. “How come he can see ‘em?”

“He’s blind too,” Santa said.

“And he can’t shift for shit,” I said.

“Long as he gets us there,” Santa said, and squirted something down his throat out of a plastic flask.

“Been fishin’ all your life?” I asked.

“Just since we been blind,” he said, and started pointing out shooters down the firing line. “Birth defect, hit by a brick, embolism, stroke, macular degeneration, roman candle, gunshot.”

“How about you?” I asked.

He showed me his teeth again. “Staring at the sun.”

“But you can see each other, right?”

“Each other, fish, birds, javelina, our old ladies.”

“Your old ladies are blind too?”

The teeth. “Naw, but they’re stacked. And they grill a hell of a smallmouth.” He pointed at empty space. “Once the coals get hot.”

“They come in the van?”

He snorted. “They live down here, so they can walk.” The flask again. “Jesus can they walk.”

“I join you?” I asked, forgetting about the heartburn.

“Coals get hot. Suit yourself.”

I went back to admiring ricochets and counting puffs of dust. Eventually the kid pulled a Ka-Bar out of his pants and started gutting the air on the end of his stringer. The pistoleros began to gather around the invisible campfire and slap imaginary asses.

“Coals are hot,” I announced to nobody. I joined the group and held up both hands to grab breasts that weren’t there.

Santa punched me in the shoulder blade and made me stumble. “No titty for you, two-eyes,” he said.

I shut my eyes. “How about this?” I asked. “Blindfold me?”

He reached inside his vest and pulled out a sweat-damp baggie. “Gotta use this.”

I took the bag and dumped the gray dust inside from one end to the other. “What is this, your grandma’s ashes?”

He teethed and said nothing.

“What do I do, smoke it?” I asked. “I didn’t bring my papers.”

“Throw it in the fire,” he said, through the teeth. “Better be sure.”

“Fuck I got to lose?” I said. I fumbled open the slippery bag and took out a handful of powder. Smelled like sulphur. “Flash powder? What am I, your beautiful assistant?”

Nothing but silver teeth.

I gave him the finger left-handed and tossed the powder onto the ground.

The report made my ears ring. Turns out the world looks white when you’re blind. I always figured black.

I reached for Santa to steady myself but I was grabbing at air. “How long till the flash wears off?” I asked, but nobody answered. “Fish smells great,” I said, but I couldn’t smell any fish.

After a few hours it started to get cold.

_{Image CC-BY-NC-SA by slworking2}

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I had myself uploaded to 350 E. Cermak in Chicago, which has three newly-acquired marine nuclear reactors anchored off Navy Pier.

But here’s the thing:

I gave up my eyes. I can see every street corner in China but it all looks like CCTV.

I gave up my ears. Fuckin’ lossy compression.

I gave up my sense of smell. I can detect homeopathic PPM’s of toxic gases, but I can’t tell one woman from another with my eyes shut.

I gave up my lips and tongue. Might as well be intubated.

I gave up my skin. I can zoom in on my oldest surviving friend and assume a POV by her side but we’ll never even brush shoulders.

I gave up my balls. I’m an immortal neuter. I’ll never get laid again.

I’ve asked 350EC to kill me, but since I’m on RAIDs, backups, offsite storage, the Internet Archive, the damn Library of Congress, NSA servers and all the copies of all the data ever stolen from any of those places, they’ve told me not to get my hopes up.

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